Music, Knowledge and the Sociology of Sound

Abstract

The sociology of music has often concentrated less on analysing and understanding the specificity and meanings of musical material culture as both an object and a process and more about ransacking music for insights into wider social relations like class, race and gender. The social constitution of music and the musical constitution of the social deserve a more sustained attempt at explicating relations and musical forms. This paper looks at the literature on what is specifically sociological about music and why music is important for sociology but also begins to problematize the relationship between social science and material culture by moving beyond popular music studies and the study of music more generally to examine the sociology of sound and sound art. We argue that this raises difficulties for the whole concept of the social as part of a human science and that new sound studies have to have a more nuanced and critical understanding of sociological epistemologies and the objects and processes they seek to explicate at the same time as understanding the material formation of music. Questions of knowledge and meaning are embedded in music and the paper concludes by thinking about knowledge and the materiality of music as knowledge.

Dead Logics and Worlds: Sound art and sonorous objects

“…We have developed here the possibilities of thinking about an anthropology of sonorous objects: considering sonorities as distributed artefacts of knowledge, accessible to methodological discipline, but whose substance and qualities determine the kinds of narratives and interpretations that we would want to extract from them in their potential descriptions of other places, social relations and ‘dead worlds’. The data journeys of sonorous objects in sound art display an affinity with musical composition (Hudson 2014b, 2015) but the notations and practice of a specifically musical description of ‘worlds’ raise profound new directions for an anthropology of sound data. New scholarly descriptions and ethnographies of music have to address representation and extraterritoriality but also what Adorno calls the ‘force of gravity of extant forms’ and the power of musical history and tradition (Adorno 1989: 93).…”

“…The sound, however, is not reducible simply to its manifestation of the meaning of society or nature but is an artefact in and of itself both displaying and dispelling the meaning and order that the listener is trying to extract or impose upon it. Hudson (2014b) has examined the ways in which a sound artefact can make itself intelligible to the listener, displaying its properties and communicating its materiality. He has questioned a reductive analysis of the sound as simply social or natural data in favour of understanding how the processed or composed sound is transposed and dislocated in new listening environments (Hudson 2014a).…”

“…Attempts to understand the meaning and signification of sounds are problematic (Hudson 2014a, 2014b) particularly when the relationship of sound art to both music and visual art is complicated by issues of composition and curation (Licht 2007) and of the classification and history of organised sound (Landy 2007: 5). Hudson has noted the use of sonorous objects in musical rather than sound art composition elsewhere and their representation of the world they are collected from (Hudson 2015).…”